There are a lot of doom and gloom headlines around at the moment. Lots of development staff being laid off, games selling far less than expected, major publishers making massive losses and release schedules that look a little thin. What is happening here?:

• The industry have become even more lemming like than normal. We get a successful game like Guitar Hero and suddenly everyone thinks it is the second coming. Other people do “me too” imitations whilst the owner of the original title flogs it to death with countless variations. Then we have the inevitable, a Beatles game that flops. Publishers are just not thinking from the customer’s perspective, people really don’t want all these similar titles.
• Annual iterations of popular titles. Another way of flogging a successful IP to death, try and get the customer to fork out every year for a slightly updated version. This is incredibly inefficient as you end up with lots of customers just buying alternate iterations. Or being turned off by the cynicism of the whole exercise. Leave 2 years between releases on popular franchises.
• Modern Warfare 2. Every publisher is frightened of being in the same market as this 800 pound gorilla. So loads of games have been launched early for Q4 ‘09 and loads more have been moved into Q1 ‘10. This is a good thing as it has spread out the previous very silly Q4 congestion. This is a bad thing because not every customer wants an adult rated war game.
• The customers are moving to online faster than the publishers are. Lots of publishers have misread just how quickly the market would change. Apple’s App Store getting one and a half billion downloads in a year and Evony getting 10 million registered users in just a few months whilst boxed cardboard and plastic retail games gather dust on the shelves is the new reality.
• Unwillingness to experiment with new IP. This is just pathetic. So many publishers now are just sitting there flogging their old IPs to death because they think it is safe. It isn’t safe at all, those IPs will not deliver for ever. Publishers need to build value in their business and the only way is with new IP. Sure it is risky, but publishing is about risk. And these days you can experiment on a cheap to develop platform and then if it works move the IP to the expensive to develop platforms. And the Apple App Store has loads of brilliant new ideas for IP.
• Awful marketing. By and large the industry markets incredibly inefficiently with advertising that preaches to the converted. Instead they should be trying to engage with the public so as to switch their spend from other pursuits. Nintendo have done this incredibly successfully but the rest of the industry have failed to take this on board.
• Secondhand sales of boxed games. Customers now buy games with an eye for the resale value. This inevitably has the effect of concentrating the market into the blockbusters, at the expense of worthy, less well known titles. And the purchasers of the secondhand games are not putting any money in the developer’s pocket.
• Mid generation lethargy. Most publishers have now released all their franchises for this generation of platforms. So they are waiting for the next generation platforms to release them all again. In the meantime they can’t think of anything for their developers to do.
• Piracy. The 360 is being hit quite hard with this now. Microsoft really to need to put a whole pile more IP protection into the Xbox 3/720/phoenix, especially if it is a mainly, or all, online machine.
• Recession. A convenient excuse. Most of the world is out of recession now (except for the UK, which has the worst run major economy). And even in recession people give up paying for their entertainment last.

So it is the management’s fault. And the few well managed companies are making hay.

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The App Store is an accident of history. (But one that was predicted on here). Apple had been making MP3 tracks available for a few years on the iStore. When they added a bit more memory and processing power to the iPod they realised that it could run third party applications, so they made an iStore for applications. And amazingly they were only doing it as a service to users, they didn’t see the business potential.

Now after a little over a year there are over 100,000 Apps and there have been over 2 billion downloads. 125,000 developers have signed up with Apple and 19.6% of Apps are games. All this has brought up some very pertinent points.

• This is the biggest success and the fastest growth, by a huge margin, of any new gaming platform in history. It has changed everything.
• Most App authors self publish to cut out the greedy publisher. They end up making far less money as a result. Apps need marketing and marketing is one of the jobs of a publisher.
• Intense competition has driven down App Store prices remorselessly. This is largely due to self publishers, in their ignorance, using the price mechanism as a marketing tool.
• Apple put up very little in the way of barriers of entry to publishing on App Store. This means that there are vast quantities of total rubbish on there.
• The other side of Apple’s policy is that there has been a vast flowering of creativity on App Store. The biggest ever in the history of the video game industry.
• Because Apple set this up as a service, not as a proper business, there is little IP protection. Piracy is rampant. Several game publishers have reported it as being in the 90% zone. Even at the stupid low prices that Apps are. People will steal to save pennies.
• The App Store gives you instant global distribution. 77 countries can download your app the instant it is available. This has shocked the whole digital IP distribution industry. There are now lots of App Store clones for other platforms.
• High street, cardboard and plastic retail distribution of digital IP has been shown up as being a dinosaur, their business model is now in steep decline.

Apple realise that they have a business model that is a license to print money. So it is pretty obvious that they will use it as a template. Firstly for their imminent tablet device which will be like a cross between a netbook and an iPhone. Then with their home console which will evolve from Apple TV just as the iPhone evolved from the iPod.

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Inevitably, and for reasons explained many times on here, the Wii bubble has finally burst. In the half year to the end of September sales were down by 40% compared with the year before. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has no option but to admit: “Wii has stalled” he even admitted that the price drop has failed to arrest the decline: “With the price drop, sales returned to a certain level, but they just did not reach the level of last year around this time”. Which was all as inevitable as night follows day.

A lot of the success of the Wii was fad. People becoming lemmings under the onslaught of peer pressure. Just like the Hula Hoop and Rubik’s Cube for previous generations. And fads have very sudden endings as the zeitgeist moves on to something new.

The Wii is a very strange and paradoxical device, its hardware capability is mainly last generation yet it boasts an innovative and compelling gesture interface. Most Wiis are bought as family toys and are little used yet it has some amazing games including possibly the stand out title of this generation, Super Mario Galaxy.

The Wii has had its popularity and life massively extended by the Balance Board and Wii Fit, but there are only so many overweight middle aged women willing to pay so much in a feeble attempt to assuage their vanity. So it looks like this market is exhausted, much to the dismay of the many publishers who thought that this was a bandwagon they could jump on. The reality is that the Balance Board is panning out as being the Reebok Step mark 2.

It doesn’t help that you can buy a vastly better machine, the Xbox 360, for less money. Even Sony have tried to be more price competitive and have improved their act in many other ways. Both these machines are introducing gesture interfaces that will finally remove the Wii’s main trump card.

We have known for a long time that the Super Wii is in the way with HD graphics and a rumoured Bluray disk drive. But this is thought to be coming some time after the middle of next year and the market needs it now. Nintendo have got their timing very wrong this time.

It has to be said that the Wii has done video gaming a massive amount of good. It has taken the medium to new markets and new demographics, vastly expanding it for everyone’s benefit. They have introduced new genres of games and extended old genres in a prodigous burst of creativity. And they have continued in their fine tradition of production values that put most of the rest of game publishing to shame.

So what is going to happen? Well it is a golden opportunity for Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Sony) to make hay whilst the sun shines. They can fill the vacuum that Nintendo have created. They need to give tens of millions of Wii owners a compelling reason to upgrade and I am sure that their marketing teams are working at doing exactly that. And my prediction still holds that the Xbox 360 will ultimately sell more units than the current non HD version of the Wii.

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I would like to point out to Patrick and to Train2Game and to Metropolitan International Schools Ltd that there is an automatic right of reply built into an internet blog like this. At the bottom of every post there is a comment section where they can put their side of the argument, without the need for any recourse to law. This is what most people do and it gives the reader a balanced view of the issues. I suggest that they do this.

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He clearly says “We don’t want to sue you” and “There is No Such Thing As Bad Press”!

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There is something about video gaming that a lot of people don’t understand, especially many politicians and much of the traditional press. And that is that gaming is just another form of media. Like the ballet, television, books, opera, film, newspapers etc etc. That is all it is. Of course gaming has made most of the older media obsolete because gaming has the technical advantages of interactivity, non linearity and connectivity. These represent such a paradigm shift that it is just about impossible to convert content from the old media to games and vice versa. Gaming also has the phenomenally powerful task/reward mechanic which is what will ultimately seal its position as the main method for delivering education.

This lack of understanding of what video games are has lead to them being demonised by the ignorant. And unfortunately the ignorant include prominent politicians and newspaper editors. But it has always been so, misunderstood new media is a feature of our history. The arrival of mass literacy in Victorian Britain was followed by the penny dreadful novel which were perceived to corrupt the youth of the day. American 20th century comic books were thought to be so bad that they were investigated by the Senate Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, there were public burnings of comic books (it isn’t just Hitler!) and some cities imposed outright bans. The establishment was so frightened of the early movie industry in America that The Supreme court in 1915 removed first amendment protection from films and in 1927 the industry was so scared of external intervention that it imposed the Hays Code upon itself. And of course in more recent years television has been blamed for youth violence, loose morals, poor academic attainments and obesity, amongst a plethora of other problems.

So against this background of fear rooted in ignorance it was hardly surprising that three British charities,  The British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK, wasted vast amounts of their donors money on a very silly advertising campaign demonising video games, implying that they caused early death. A totally ridiculous position. This campaign was in support of a government health advertising campaign under the Change4Life banner, but the government’s adverts were completely different using plasticine Wallace and Gromit type figures.

(As a side note some sectors of the press didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story and hysterically tried to blame the charities’ campaign on the government.)

And now we have the deepest irony, pouring total scorn on the three idiot charities Change4Life has now approved a video game, Wii Fit Plus, which will be marketed under its banner. According to the BBC: “A health department spokesman said active video games were a ‘great way’ to get kids moving.”

I think that this is a great, a fantastic, example of how quickly a lot of people are becoming educated about the reality of video games. And how using false and simplistic stereotypes no longer works. A lot of this shift in attitude comes from the democratisation of the power of the press. The centre of gravity of knowledge has moved from print and broadcast to the internet. Blogs, forums, social networking, social indexing (stumbleupon, reddit), microblogging and all the websites (like the BBC, Wikipedia, Amazon and Metacritic) that invite comment and participation are the internet. The dynamic, interactive, user generated whole that reflects the humanity that created it. We can no longer be dictated to by old media and dinosaur politicians. The world has changed for the better.

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Patrick Charnley of the solicitors Eversheds has sent me a letter on behalf of their client Train2Game. This is eactly how legal reputation management works. They are trying to bully me into censoring an article that their client does not like, even though that article self evidently only contains the truth. They have succeeded in getting YouTube to remove the three videos that showed a Train2Game salesman at work. You would wonder why Train2Game wanted these removed. In fact their actions speak volumes.

Bruceongames now comes top of quite a lot of Google searches, this makes me a target for people who only want their version of the world reported on the internet.

I took the article down for a little over a week whilst I spoke to various legal and journalistic experts including no win no fee solicitors. One told me that the charges against me are ridiculous. Obviously the article is now back up.

Read this letter, it is amazing stuff, they are even trying to prevent me from talking about the Blitz Academy website. How blatant an attempted suppression of free speech can you get?

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As regular readers will know Evony are trying to sue me for libel in an Australian court. So we have a plaintiff from country A trying to sue a defendant from country B in country C. They can do this because judgements from Australian courts are enforceable in England. And they are trying to say that because internet content is available globally they can sue me in any country they feel like. Obviously they have chosen Australia to create the maximum difficulty in my defending myself, they are misusing the Australian legal system to censor the internet.

They are going after me because I exposed Evony to the harsh light of publicity. The Guardian newspaper did the same but they are not taking the Guardian to court because the Guardian have the resources to defend themselves from such spurious claims.

Libel is incredible expensive to bring to court, some cases end up with legal costs of over a million pounds. To get my case just to the first day of court in Australia should cost me over £50,000. You can see why freedom of speech is threatened here. Because my case is setting a precedent my lawyers have agreed to act on a no win no fee basis with no win no fee. In other words they will try and extract costs from Evony for bringing a frivolous case before the courts. But in the mean time there are a lot of costs to cover in putting the case together.

Obviously I can reduce myself to penury and send every penny I have to them. This seems a little harsh for just telling the truth. I have already sent them a substantial sum, as much as I can reasonably afford. So I have created a way that you can contribute to the fighting fund with the PayPal donate button at the side of this article. Anything would help, £1 even. It all adds up. So please help with a donation. And a big thank you to those who have already donated, it is much appreciated.

For those who live in the UK, a letter to their MP may help. Here is a draft that could be used:

Dear MP,

As you know there is a significant threat to freedom of speech with lawyers practicing reputation management on the internet. They threaten libel action against the authors of content that their clients don’t like, whether it is the truth or not. Those authors are then forced to withdraw that content because of the massive costs of defending their, often truthful, position. Obviously this mechanism is used most frequently by those with the most to hide. The libel law is thus being used against the interests of your constituents.

In a further twist we now have a Chinese video game, Evony, with a recently incorporated Delaware front company, sueing a British blogger, Bruce Everiss, in an Australian court. They are indulging in this extreme libel tourism firstly because Australian libel judgements are enforceable in England and secondly in order to make it as difficult as possible for Mr Everiss to defend what he maintains to be a truthful position. If Evony succeed it will open the floodgates of undefendable action being taken against British people in Australian courts.

As your constituent I would like to know what you are doing to maintain the freedom of speech on the internet. Also I would like to know what the government are doing to prevent the total abuse of the legal system that is happening in the case of Mr Everiss and Evony,

regards, etc

So there we have two ways that you can help. Please do so because what Evony are doing is a threat to every one’s freedoms.

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We have a general election coming up and I won’t be voting for my current MP, Bob Ainsworth. And the reason is simple, I asked him about the Evony thing and his reply was, to me, less than helpful. Judge for yourself:

from Bruce Everiss to smithn@parliament.uk, ainsworthr@parliament.uk date 5 October 2009 11:28 subject Big problem mailed-by everiss.com

Hi,

I am a constituent of yours.
I have a big problem in that I am being sued by an American front company for a Chinese video game (Evony) in an Australian court!

Firstly, Evony are indulging in litigation tourism of the very worst kind, they are using the Australian legal system in an attempt to make it impossible for me to defend myself properly. Australia has reciprocal arrangements with the UK for enforcing judgement.

Secondly what they are doing is a threat to the freedom of speech of tens of millions of bloggers around the world, if we can’t write the truth because the Australian legal system is sitting waiting to zap us then it is a sad day for everyone.

Is there anything you can do about this, please?

regards,

Bruce

And his reply:

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There is now a lot of interesting stuff about this Chinese browser game on this blog. Much of this has been contributed by readers with experience of the game, so I strongly suggest that you read the comments after every article, they contain some absolute gems.

The Chinese gold farmers came to my attention when they first started spamming the forums and blogs that I run. Gold farmers are part of the underbelly of the interweb alongside pornographers and fake Viagra sellers, so they use the same black hat marketing techniques that abuse the internet and its users and which are illegal in many countries, such as spamming everything they can spam. One of these gold farmers is an organisation with many names including Super Continental, UMGE and WoWMine. Article:

Making gold in China

Then earlier this year Bruceongames was comment spammed regularly by a Chinese MMO called Evony, which was publicising itself as being the product of UMGE. (They have since gone into denial and tried to remove all mention of this association from the internet, including deleting the whole website UMGE.com). Because of the spamming I recommended that people avoid Evony in this article:

Don’t play Evony

The response to this was so big that I found out a lot more about this game. And so on July the 15 this year I wrote the article More about Evony. On the same day The Guardian newspaper published an article: Has Evony become the most despised game on the web?

More about Evony

As a result of the feedback from this I got a lot of information from players of the game saying that it was causing problems with their computer, so I put this together as an article on July 16, specifically pointing out “I am not saying that Evony has a trojan in its client software”. This article attracted further comments from players with bad experiences:

Is Evony malware?

Evony were obviously unhappy with the truth about themselves reaching the light of day so they made a tactical change. On 22 July they incorporated Evony LLC, a Delaware company. They then tried to become American and removed all mention of their Chinese heritage from the internet. Evony LLC then started to act against me for what I had written before they even existed! I got a threatening letter from Dean Groundwater, a solicitor from the Australian small town firm Warren McKeon Dickson:

Evony want to sue me for telling the truth

At about the same time Valerie from Evony distributed an email that told a whole pile of easily demonstrable lies about Evony, the issues I had raised and about me. I reported this and rebutted the lies with this article:

Evony libel me

Then on September 14 Evony issued a press release saying that they were taking me to court for telling the truth. In the press release Dean Groundwater accuses me of fraud, a very serious allegation.

Evony press release

I then wrote an article explaining more about the people behind Evony:

Eric Lam, UMGE, WoWMine and Evony

I have also written a few background articles to try and put some of what is happening here into context.

The game mechanic and its subversion

A hidden danger of MMOs

How the internet is being censored

I also reported a few further bad things about Evony, brought to my attention by readers of Bruceongames. Racialism and the online gambling in the game:

Anti Semitism in Evony

Evony in big trouble

Along the way we have also had some fun:

Queen of Evony competition

Evony advert ridiculed by PopCap

I don’t like Evony, that much should be obvious. I don’t like their black hat marketing, spamming blogs and spamming Google adsense. And I don’t like the way they have put gold farming inside the game, subverting the game mechanic by the payment of money so as to extract the maximum wealth from the player. But most of all I don’t like the way they try and suppress freedom of speech by trying to censor the internet to prevent people knowing the truth about them.

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